


All In Your Head

by saiyanshewolf (gossamerstarsxx)



Series: Shot Through the Heart [3]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Anxiety, Comfort, Dreams and Nightmares, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Feelings, Feels, Getting to Know Each Other, Hurt, Hurt/Comfort, Mental Health Issues, Night Terrors, Nightmares, Non-Chronological, One Shot, One Shot Collection, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Relationship, Sleep Paralysis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-01
Updated: 2018-02-01
Packaged: 2019-03-12 05:11:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13540389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gossamerstarsxx/pseuds/saiyanshewolf
Summary: After a close call with a pack of feral ghouls, MacCready isn't handling things well.





	All In Your Head

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings** : Graphic depiction of sleep paralysis/night terrors. [Yes, I'm aware that sleep paralysis and night terrors aren't the same and shouldn't occur at the same time. Please tell that to my brain, since I've been having sleep paralysis-turned-night-terror issues since I was five.]
> 
>  **Notes** : There is no way in hell that MacCready doesn't have PTSD. The game touches on it with allusions to Mac being depressed, thinking it might have been better if he and Duncan had died with Lucy, etc., but it doesn't go much further than that. Fortunately, there's one thing I can be counted on to do as a fic writer, and that's explore a character's trauma to the furthest extent possible! *cough*copingmechanismswhat*cough*
> 
> Sole Survivor is [Antha](http://saiyanshewolf.tumblr.com/tagged/my+sole+survivor).

# 1.

A hand slips over his mouth. MacCready's body is awake in an instant, but his mind is slower.

His right hand flashes out and he seizes the would-be attacker by the neck. At the same time, his left hand drops to his hip where he keeps his combat knife, but the figure above him pins his wrist to the ground before he can grab it.

Operating on nothing but instinct, he digs his fingers into their throat, squinting into the darkness as adrenaline floods his body. The hand on his wrist bears down until the bones grind together and MacCready is on the verge of driving a knee into the figure's stomach when his eyes and his brain manage to sync up with one another.

It's Antha.

He releases her as soon as he recognizes her, torn between fear that he may have hurt her and fury at being woken up in such a way. He expects her to let him go as well, and when she all she does is let up the pressure on his wrist he furrows his brow and narrows his eyes: _What the hell?!_

Antha stares at him, wide eyed, the smoldering embers of the fire painting her face in a soft, warm glow as her gaze begins to shift to her right. She gives the most minute of nods: _That way._

MacCready's skin crawls. Something is wrong. Following Antha's lead he turns his head and peers into the darkness.

Little more than five yards away, three hunched, humanoid figures shuffle about in the shadows. Their skulls are bare and misshapen, their skeletal bodies draped in rags. One of them turns its head and its sunken eyes give off a faint radioactive gleam.

Ferals.

Every muscle in his body grows tense. These are too close for comfort; worse, three more are staggering around in the distance. It is nothing short of a miracle that he and Antha haven't been discovered, swarmed, slaughtered -

His breath locks in his chest as his fight-or-flight response kicks in. MacCready bites the inside of his cheek, struggling to keep his head - either reaction will get them killed. 

They're too close. That's all there is to it. They haven't noticed them, not yet, but one wrong move will bring all six of them running. They would have no time to fight them off before - before -

_Oh, god._

Acid rises up his throat. MacCready swallows it back, conquering his nausea by pure force of will.

There is nothing to do for it but stay still.

How long had it taken for Antha to inch toward him without drawing their attention? Or had they come close just as she meant to wake him for his watch?

_It doesn't matter._

There is nothing he can do but lie on the cold ground with Antha kneeling over him, with one hand curled into the straps of her leather armor and the other pinned to the ground, her warm, calloused palm against his lips, both of them too terrified to so much as glance at one another. He can't even bring himself to close his eyes, because the only thing worse than a feral ghoul is a feral ghoul he can't see.

Trapped by Antha, by the ghouls, by his own head, he stares.

The longer he stares, watching their jerky, spasmodic movements, listening to their thick, rasping breaths, the more he remembers.

The more he remembers the more the world around him fades, until he has only a distant awareness of Antha, her touch, the faint firelight, of where, and when, he is.

He stares and in his mind it happens again, clawlike rotted hands appearing from the dark, grabbing her face, raking it to bleeding ribbons in one swipe, he hears her scream his name and sees her reach for him and then there are teeth in her throat and the horde descends on her but she's still screaming his name, still calling for him as he turns and runs away, the metro station echoes it back at him and now his mind is doing the same and it never ends, it never stops, she will never stop suffering, never stop dying, because of him, it's his fault, it's all his fault -

Antha's hand tightens on his wrist.

The pressure brings MacCready out of his own head enough for him to realize how rough and erratic his breathing has become, how badly he's shaking...and that the biggest feral is staring straight at them.

He and Antha both stop breathing.

The feral stands fixed, its faded, pupil-less eyes burning with radiation as it gazes at them...and then it looks away again, turning its sick glare across the Wasteland.

Antha's grip eases. She breathes again. After a moment, so does MacCready. The three closest ghouls glance back and forth as if they can't decide where to go, and MacCready has no choice but to watch them, too afraid to let them out of his sight despite how much they sicken him. Instead of falling back into nightmarish memories, he tries to focus on the ghouls themselves; their movements are twitchy, almost birdlike, so alien to their humanoid shape that it sets his teeth on edge, and he soon realizes that this is not better than his memories, only a different kind of awful. Watching them move makes him want to scream, and the longer he watches the more convinced he becomes that he will scream, it's building in his throat and Antha's hand over his mouth won't be enough to stop it, he will scream and scream until the ferals scream with him, until rotting radioactive teeth sink into his throat and tear out his vocal chords...

The ferals stop moving. Antha's fingers tighten around his wrist. Blood roars in MacCready's ears and he digs his teeth into his tongue to hold the mounting panic at bay.

It seems an eternity that the ferals stand there, grotesque statues in the dark...and then the biggest one takes off, sprinting away with uncanny, nightmarish speed, soon followed by the rest.

Neither he nor Antha move.

Two minutes pass. The panic spreads from his chest into the rest of his body, leaving him anxious, on edge.

Three minutes. It's easier to breathe. The need to scream has died down, but his heartbeat is still echoing in his ears.

Five minutes. His head aches. It's hard to think straight, but when Antha catches his eye and gives a tiny nod, he knows what she means and nods back.

She releases his wrist and slides her hand away from his mouth. MacCready eases up onto his elbow, his hand still hooked into a strap of Antha's armor as if he intends to pull her on top of him. They stay still, listening for shuffling steps, searching for gleaming eyes, but the night is dark and silent.

When they turn their heads to look at one another, they freeze yet again, eyes wide, breath shallow.

_She has freckles._

It's an idiotic, irrational thought, but it's the only one that his mind is giving him at the moment. The only reason he can see them is because he has never been this close to her face. She is still leaning over him on her hands and knees, but now that MacCready is sitting up on his elbow rather than lying pinned below her, they are almost nose to nose.

_Freckles. What the hell?_

He swallows hard, trying to get ahold of himself - it's so hard to think. The click of his throat working seems to shake Antha out of her own head. She sits back on her heels, running her fingers through her hair, and as MacCready lets go of her armor, he realizes his hands are shaking.

"Sorry." Her voice is soft, as if she expects the ferals to reappear at any moment.

"S'okay."

"I couldn't think of anything else to do. I noticed them but there were too many for me to pick off alone. They seemed far enough away that I had time to wake you but they just kept getting closer and I was afraid you'd roll over or wake up or...oh, Christ." She speaks far too quickly, trailing off into a ragged laugh that she stifles behind her palm. "And I used to think zombie movies were so boring. Fuck, I hate those things."

MacCready scrubs his hands over his face, two days of stubble rasping across his palms.

"Yeah," he mutters. "Yeah, me too. You want me to watch?"

Antha shakes her head. "You've still got two more hours. Go on back to sleep. I'll just sit closer so I can wake you up right away if they come back."

"You sure?"

"I got this, Mac." She nods toward his bedroll as she shifts a few feet away, leaning back against a long-dead tree stump and pulling her rifle into her lap.

"Safety off?" he asks.

Antha rolls her eyes. "Yes, sir."

Another night MacCready would have a variety of comebacks for that; tonight he has none. The only reason he even bothers to lie down again is to avoid having to talk.

_No way I'm getting any more sleep tonight. Not after that._

Unfortunately, he does.

 

# 2.

It has been so long since this happened...so long, in fact, that MacCready had begun to believe he might even be over it, but now it's happening again and the experience is just as hellish as ever. Perhaps even worse.

When Antha had covered his mouth with her palm, his body had come awake before his mind; this time, it's his mind that is awake and his body that hasn't caught up.

MacCready knows that he is dreaming. He knows that he is only watching Lucy die in his mind, knows that this nightmare will end if he could just wake up, but he can't.

He can't wake up because he can't move, can't even breathe, and a horrible dark shape is beginning to coalesce from the threads of his nightmare, gathering above him and hovering there like a dark, noxious gas, and he knows what form it's going to take even before its features begin to define themselves because it always takes the same one.

_It's not real. It's not real, it's a nightmare, I'll wake up and it will be gone, it's not real, it's not real, no matter what it's not real..._

Of course it isn't real. It's isn't even a hallucination. It's only a dream, a figment of his imagination, but the knowledge is less than comforting when he is trapped in his own body being preyed upon by his own mind.

Lucy crawls on top of him.

Hideous, ghoulified, feral, she climbs onto his body like a loathsome reptile. A crushing weight bears down upon his chest, incongruous to her emaciated, rotting body, and his consciousness is so disconnected from his physical form that MacCready can no longer even force it to draw breath.

The nightmare creature stares at him with Lucy's blue eyes. They glow in the dark like foxfire as it opens the yawning maw of its mouth, a fetid grey hole filled with jagged broken teeth and a rotting stump of tongue.

He can't breathe - he can't breathe he can't _breathe_ and if he suffocates under the weight of his worst nightmare it will trap him here with this perversion of his dead wife sitting on his chest for eternity, and the thought is so horrifying that his mind dissolves into pure desperate panic, struggling with his unresponsive physical form as every survival instinct ingrained in him since birth rises up -

MacCready flails upright, sucking in a choked breath as his mind regains control of his body. Though his eyes are open, the world is dim, full of shadows; the campfire is down to embers, casting only the faintest light, and he can still see her face hovering in front of his eyes, can still feel her on his chest, her decayed body soft as a toadstool, skin sloughing off in spongy strips -

"MacCready?"

He squeezes his eyes shut and clutches his hair to the roots, trying to make it hurt, needing it to hurt enough to override whatever madness has taken hold of his mind, but the horror won't go away, the panic won't subside, he still sees her face, her dead rotten feral face -

"Mac...? Oh...oh no..."

_Antha._

A distant part of him that still clings to sanity knows that when this passes he will be furious with himself for letting it happen, for letting someone else see him this way, but the rising tide of terror in his chest drowns it out.

"Hey, MacCready, it's okay," she mumbles. "Listen to me, you can hear me, right? Just nod, you don't have to talk."

He nods, wishing he could tell her not to let go, to keep talking, but either pride or panic keeps him from saying so.

"Good, just keep listening, all right?" She squeezes his shoulders, as if she can read his mind. "You were dreaming, that's all, yeah? Guess I should have let you watch after all."

MacCready listens to her voice, focuses on the pressure of her hands, and tries to shove everything else away.

"I was wide awake so I let you sleep on through," she continues. "Guess this'll teach me to be nice, huh? Next time I'll get your ass up right on time, okay? The good news is it'll be morning soon, so we can get the hell out of here. Head back to Goodneighbor and give Hancock all these damn herbs we've collected so he can cook up his fireworks - he always pays well, too, so that's good, right?"

That's right. Hancock's damn fireworks - said he was getting an early start on the Fourth.

MacCready relaxes a little.

_Christ, could I use a drink._

"That's better." Antha sounds as if she's smiling; one hand leaves his shoulder and closes around one of his wrists. "Now why don't you take your hands out of your hair? You don't want to end up like Deacon, do you?"

MacCready almost laughs as he pulls his aching hands away from his scalp and straightens his back, finally glancing up at Antha. Sure enough, the sun is rising right behind her; he thinks there's a poem about that, or maybe it was a line from a play, something comparing a girl to the rising sun. As the sky lightens he notices a faint mark on her throat - right where his thumb had been the night before.

Nausea churns in his stomach.

_Pathetic. She paid you to hurt other people, not her, and she damn sure shouldn't have to deal with a grown ass man falling apart over a bad dream about his dead wife._

"Mac? You okay?"

He shrugs her hands away and bows his head, disgusted with himself, at a loss as to how he can even begin to apologize.

"Quit fussing, already," he mutters, defaulting to his old standoffishness. "I'm fine."

He is not fine and she had been doing the very opposite of fussing, but Antha - the first one to call him out when he's being an asshole for no good reason - only nods.

"All right," she says, getting to her feet and moving out of his personal space. "Then we'll get ready to head out."

And that's that. She backs off without another word. MacCready can't quite believe it.

They clean up their little camp in silence. It's a tense silence on his part, but he gets the sense that Antha is unperturbed by both the incident and his rudeness....which just makes him even more angry with himself.

As he kicks dirt over the embers of the fire MacCready forces himself to speak, though he stares into the dying coals instead of looking at Antha.

"I'm sorry. About grabbing you like that, last night."

"Don't worry about it. Figured something like that would happen," Antha says. "But not because you're some kind of violent jerk, Mac."

He glances toward her. "Then why?"

"'Cause of the world you've lived in." Antha slings her rifle across her back and finger-combs through the hair on the left side of her head. "It's nothing I haven't seen before, to be honest. That and the sleep paralysis."

MacCready frowns. "Sleep paralysis?"

"You were having a nightmare before you woke up, weren't you?"

He nods, angry with himself all over again for being so obvious.

"And you knew it was a nightmare, didn't you? Knew it and couldn't wake up?"

He lifts his head and stares at her, incredulous. "How'd you know that?"

"You woke up sucking in air like you'd been drowning," she says. "Like you couldn't even make yourself breathe. Stuck in your own head afterward. Same thing happened to Nate after Anchorage. Sleep paralysis and night terrors when he slept. Hypervigilance and panic attacks while he was awake."

Antha hasn't mentioned Nate or Shaun once since the night they spent in the Gunner base a couple months ago; it takes MacCready a second to remember that her husband had been in the army.

"Anchorage?" he asks, awestruck. "As in the Battle of Anchorage?"

Antha nods. "Most of it got better the longer he was home. Didn't go away, but didn't happen as often. The hypervigilance stuck around."

She looks up at the morning sky and falls silent for a moment, her throat working as she swallows. MacCready says nothing, wondering if she's trying not to cry.

"Anyway, my point is you don't have to apologize or be embarrassed about it," she says at length, glancing back at him. "I knew what I was getting into trying to wake you up, and none of this is gonna make me think you're weak, or whatever it is you're worried about. Kinda the opposite, actually."

MacCready opens his mouth to speak, but nothing comes out. It's just as well; Antha is already heading down the road that will take them back to Goodneighbor.

 _Sleep paralysis. Night terrors. Hypervigilance._ He runs a hand along the back of his neck and follows after her. _I guess now I at least know the words for whatever the hell's wrong with my head._

Knowing the words is good, but he still has no excuse, no matter what Antha says. Whatever is screwed up in his head, it's his problem, not hers.

_Can't let that happen any more. Can't risk hurting her again._


End file.
